Class Websites

I was amazed how my classmates' web-sites have evolved since the beginning of this course. I think all of my class mates are smart and creative and they all have very good tastes. The feature that changed our web-site most distinctively is, I think, the use of the dream weaver. Using the table and layout, we could make our page look cool and professional and with the choice of various fonts of the dream weaver, we could raise our page's design quality. Considering the fact that we are living in the generation the design matters and the fact that our students are the generations who are technologically savvy and the visual aspects matter a lot to them, ability to incorporate the visual images with a good design quality in our web site is important, I believe. Flash and the dream weaver, even I confronted a lot of unexpected issues to solve, provide us very effective and relatively easy way to present contents in the web -site without using a special language. I'm happy that I learned all that in this class and I'm ready to make my future class web- site now!

Technolgy and education

Reading Susan's blog about the technology in education made me also want to think and blog about it. Education is becoming, more than ever, an amorphous living organism that evolves with the times and technology. The key is to coexist with technology for technology cannot be stopped. A statistic at UNC shows that 95% of the students utilize Facebook. These same students, in all likelihood, went to a high school that does not condone the use of Facebook. The point here is clear; you cannot stop students from doing what is popular. Thus, we must search for ways to coexist with social networking technology. Social networking sites are useful because they are just that: social networking made easier. Many students who wouldn’t have shared lunch let alone ideas in school may be “best friends” online. Many students may find that instant feedback on their pieces of writing or problems are extremely useful to their education. Furthermore, many students who feel that they cannot approach a certain teacher about a problem they didn’t understand could approach these same teachers easily in an online community. Of course I’m mentioning some of the more ideal educational ideas here. However, at the very least, the schools must recognize that social networking and their popularity are not going to go away. Therefore, schools must teach the students how to utilize these networks without exposing themselves too much to potentially dangerous individuals.

Making a flash assigment page in one

1. In the insert menu of the dream weaver, I set the path to put flash and the flash is inserted.

2. I made the animation buttons first when I did the assignment, but it would be so annoying if all plays with sounds simultaneously, so I added a control on the first animation and the second one which is a music video of Big Bang.
3. For the first animation, I inserted the action script in the frame. I put 'stop' on the first frame and in the last frame in the whole and I put 'go to and play' action script on the play button so that it can go to frame 2 and play until it meet the 'stop' action script and stop. I put 'stop' action in the stop button to make it automatically stops if pressed.

4. For the big bang music video, I went to .fla file again and on the stage, in the properties, I chose the option to remove the auto play in the web.

Thoghts on Open Source

Internet has allowed many people to share information at the same time. Now, more than ever, it is allowing people to not only share information, but to edit it and to learn from it. There has been no shortage of success stories of open source websites and software programs. Many programs allow free information to be passed onto those who need it. While the reliability of some of these sites such as Wikipedia.com has been brought to question on more than one occasion, its popularity proves that such sites are here to stay. I believe open source programs and systems are great assets to education. The ultimate goal of education lies in the greater good of humanity. Information, in academic context, should be free and available to all. Allowing free access to books (Gutenberg project) and in some cases exams and course notes (MIT) are incredibly advantageous for those interested in a particular subject. Furthermore, by putting the coursework and the books online, people around the world with similar educational or academic interests can share their ideas freely. In addition, because the information that is accessible is specifically geared towards those who are searching for them, there is no real danger from outside intruders abusing the system. However, if there is one down side to open source systems is that sometimes they can result in misleading information. For example, I know that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for research information because it can be edited by anybody. Nevertheless, if the system is well monitored and scrutinized for errors by a competent staff of experts, then I see no problems in allowing the usage of open source systems as legitimate research resources.